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Enlightenment
Hampstead Theatre Autumn 2010
Midway through
Shelagh Stephenson's drama a character complains of a proposed TV
documentary that it began about one subject but has morphed into a
sexier but less significant topic.
The same could be said of the play itself.
Enlightenment begins as a study in pain. The parents of a backpacker who
disappeared in Indonesia, possibly but not certainly victim of a
terrorist bombing, exist in an unbearable limbo, unable either to live
in hope or begin the process of grieving.
The mother is
driven to consult a dubious medium and convinced to allow an ambitious
TV producer to do a show about her, in hopes of generating leads.
The peculiar and unbearable pain of not knowing is brought alive in
these early scenes, but then another boy appears who may have
information about their son, they take him in, and the play becomes a
minor variant on John Guare's Six Degrees Of Separation.
I'm not giving away anything you won't guess long before the play gets
around to telling you when I say that the boy is not what he seems and
that he is lying to worm his way into their lives.
His motives and character are much darker than the parallel character in
Guare's play, but also more trivial - Stephenson does not explore the
neediness or the ironies of his quest, but just presents him as a
bogeyman - and the play never recovers from this extended digression.
Meanwhile, a strained attempt to create a symbol out of a scientific
experiment showing that the slightest variables can snowball to affect
an outcome fails, simply because that idea really has nothing to do with
the play.
As in Guare's play, there are several other characters, but the only
ones that matter are the mother and the interloper.
Julie Graham gets our sympathy and understanding from the start and then struggles to keep the play's focus on her character, where it belongs, just barely succeeding in winning it back at the end.
Tom
Weston-Jones gives a generous performance, doing justice to his
character while clearly trying not to warp the play too much when its
attention turns to him.
Director Edward Hall doesn't seem aware of or able to paper over the
cracks in the play's structure.
Gerald Berkowitz
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Review of Enlightenment - Hampstead Theatre 2010